Our school applied for this award at the start of 2015. With Ms Louise Brassil as co-ordinator, we completed the 3 step programme successfully to receive the Digital School of Distinction Award, accredited by the Department of Education. We were inspected to see how computers are being used throughout the school. We embraced Interactive Whiteboards years ago, and now have them in every classroom. Some classes have their homework put up online daily.
We use the Aladdin system in our school, whereby most correspondence with parents (notes home) is done via this Parent Portal, which is available as an App on smartphones. Parents can view a school calendar of events, give reasons for absences, view school reports and book Parent Teacher times. The book lists can be viewed through this App too. We find this system fantastic for cutting down on paper and for speed of delivery of messages.
During the Summer of 2014, parent Dónal O'Connor kindly donated 8 computers to the school. After fundraising in May 2014, our school purchased 15 laptops for the children's use. Since then, we have had a cake sales which saw us raise enough to buy 4 iPads. Since then we have increased this to 7 iPads in the school. We participate in the Hour of Code, as well as Scratch and Coding Programmes and with our major fundraiser taking place in October 2019 we will continue to add to the number of iPads
We continue to use computers in the classroom, with the help and guidance of our SET teacher and technology co-ordinator Ms Rose O’Connor. Our Principal , Mr Robbie O’Connell also assists with this as he is an accredited Apple Teacher . In 2018-2020, we are taking part in a STEM initiative whereby we use Bee-bots which is coding for infants.